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What really makes us human?

« H E Pat Spelling :: email
posted Saturday, 17 May 2008

I work as a Chaplain in an inpatient psychatric unit.  Now, where I work is NOTHING like the ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. We have a nice facility, almost always full and the staff really does care.  Lately I have been working with several chronically depressed patients that suffer from BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER and several with SOCIOPATHIC PERSONALITY. 

As I work with these folks, they have one thing in common--- you can work very hard to uncover who they really are and never find anything.... they take on bits and pieces of what they think I want to hear but never reveal themselves.  Frankly, they don't know themselves either.  Often, the more layers peeled back reveal nothing....it is singularly frightening to me that these people could be robbed of basic personality developement.

Often there is a common theme, one of Good VS Evil and a complaint that the Devil has captured them.  It makes me think seriously about evil.  If you examine the life history of these folks, it is often horrific or tragic, they have often been victims of evil, such as horrible physical abuse or sexual abuse.

I think of ancient theories in which people believed in changelings.  There is a close concurrent of poltergiest activity with young females being sexually abused.   I think the theological question remains....how does God see these people?  Many of which do some very evil things in their acting out.  How can people turn to God when they have no concious and are unable to get beyond themselves? We were discussing this in class and someone pointed out that only a total "RESTORATION FROM GOD" could help these people.  But then, restoration implies there is something to restore.  If the big event that stunted the person's personality development happened at age three and the person is now 33, would restoration help?  I guess I am thinking that restoration would return a person to where they had been before things broke down. Is restoration truly only available in the next life?

I don't know....many questions for me.  While I believe that God loves and cares for the mentally ill and that God is capable of forgiving anyone according to their circumstances, I am not sure how God views the sociopath that behaves in such evil ways that he/she simply looks at others as prey.  If they don't have capacity, can they be guilty, even if their actions are clear?
Hmmm...

What do you think?

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comments (1)


1. BlackPhi left...
Sunday, 18 May 2008 2:24 pm :: http://blackphi.blog-city.com/

"This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light" - is there enough humanity present to make an instinctive choice when faced with the light of Jesus, however they might perceive that? If you stripped away 30 years of wrong, leaving a three-year -old capable of choosing the light, would that be something human? Would he/she/it be redeemable? Personally, I don't see why not; but then my experience of sociopathic personality disorder is all third-hand.

If someone had a physical disorder such that they had to be cared for like a two- or three-year old, they would still presumably be considered children of God, at least potentially. If someone had a similarly disabling intellectual disorder then I'd guess the same would apply. In either case there are special problems when this level of development is combined with a much bigger, stronger body, so special care has to be taken to prevent them harming themselves or others. If someone has an emotional disorder such that their concept of 'other' remains at the level of a two- or three-year old, how different is that? It's different perhaps to us, because they look physically normal, and they can produce a relatively normal intellectual response, but God sees the inside. Surely He'd see the severe emotional disorder just as we see a severe physical disorder. So theologically, what is the difference between the three cases? In particular, what would 'restoration' mean for a severely physically or intellectually disabled man, in this world or the next, and would it mean something different for your sociopaths?

Another interesting post.